Corporate Tax Dodging In the Fifty States, 2008-2010

In October, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley suggested that gradually repealing the state’s corporate income tax should be a priority for lawmakers in 2012. Haley’s idea was alarming, but hardly surprising: in the past year, governors in Arizona and Florida have proposed similar plans, and lawmakers in a number of other states have moved to enact expensive new corporate tax breaks or reduce the corporate tax rate. Noticeably absent from the policy debates in these states, however, has been any discussion of whether businesses in each of these states are currently paying the corporate income tax to begin with.

This report uses data from the annual financial reports filed by some of the biggest and most profitable Fortune 500 corporations to shed light on this question—and to identify strategies for ensuring that state corporate income taxes will continue to play an important role in state tax systems going forward.